Moxa Industrial Surveillance Products Affected by RCE Vulnerability

A vulnerability that can be leveraged for arbitrary code execution has been found in a tool used for integrating industrial IP surveillance solutions developed by Moxa, a Taiwan-based company that specializes in industrial networking, computing, and automation solutions.

According to ICS-CERT, independent researcher Ariele Caltabiano identified a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in Moxa VPort SDK Plus, a free tool that enables third party developers to create customized video management systems and integrate VPort series products with comprehensive monitoring and control systems, such as SCADA and HMI.

The flaw, which affects Moxa VPort ActiveX SDK Plus versions prior to 2.8, can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable VPort application.

“A function in ActiveX has a Stack-Based Buffer Overflow vulnerability. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may allow insertion of lines of assembly code such as a call to another tool,” ICS-CERT wrote in its advisory.

The vulnerability, reported by Caltabiano through HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2015-0986 and a CVSS score of 7.5 (high severity).

ICS-CERT says there is no evidence that public exploits specifically targeting this vulnerability exist. However, the organization has pointed out that even an attacker with low skill can develop an exploit.

Moxa released VPort ActiveX SDK Plus 2.8 Build 15030913 in March to address the vulnerability. The company noted in the changelog that this release fixes a “potential security issue that is caused by buffer overflow when doing regkey set or get.”

Organizations are advised by ICS-CERT to update their installations and minimize exposure of critical systems.

Eduard Kovacs is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.